Tuesday Workout of the Week: Brain Power

So it’s a little slow going here at Every48 due to a slightly unfortunate training accident on Sunday. I must say, my skinned knees would make any hard-core rugby player proud, and there might just be a bottle or two of ibuprofen that gets noshed in the next week or so around here (anti-inflammatories). But nothing’s broken. Counting blessings, once again.

And that brings us to the Workout of the Week:

Brain Power!

Brain power! Remember to work out your brain as well as your body by continually trying new things and learning new skills. Mine this week: building a website from scratch. (Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

There’s a new website up for the Wellness Playbook as of yesterday afternoon, and it’s a doozy: a complete rebuild that was created on a local drive, then uploaded to the live site. The fun part? I did it all by myself. (Well, almost – I had a few “yikes” moments and checked in with a couple of WordPress badasses to make sure I was on the right track.)

There were a couple of hairy moments: some database tables weren’t exporting properly, some login information had to be manually adjusted in a .php file or two, and of course there are the ubiquitous broken links that happen when your site goes from thinking it lives on a local server (the equivalent of Little Red Riding Hood’s house in the woods) to going big-time and moving into a condo in Manhattan. Here I am, world! Oh, whoops, there’s a broken link. And another. And another…

(Solution: SQL queries).

So today’s Workout of the Week is a little different than the usual fare:

Work out your brain.

Work out your brain. Learn new stuff. (Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

I’m not sure when I got the idea that coding and doing this sort of fairly technical work was beyond me. Dropping my first computer science class in college, which I tried to take (for a grade, as opposed to pass/fail) as a fifth-course elective probably didn’t help.

(And, hello, where were the advisors to, ahem, advise me that it would likely be a better idea to stay with a normal course load so I had enough time to enjoy the course and really get into it? Hmmm.)

Anyway. We’re beginning to get a really good idea about what intellectual curiosity and some small tiny issues such as, you know, whether you get dementia, might possibly be interrelated. Staying intellectually curious and never, ever saying “I’m too old for that” (unless “that” happens to be, say, enrolling in nursery school – because if you’re reading this, yes, you are too old for that) is actually a key marker of healthy aging.

Vigorous physical exercise keeps our circulatory systems humming, including the blood vessels that course through our brains. But then we gotta use ’em. Study a new language. Learn a new skill. A fiftysomething friend of mine is putting the finishing touches on her Ph.D. dissertation this month, for goodness’ sakes. There is no age limit, as long as we make that decision to stay intellectually curious.

So, get out there and learn how to build a local website and upload it to a live server. Or learn French, or Italian, or Farsi. Or try the upcoming Hour of Code from Seattle nonprofit code.org if you want to try your hand at computer science and see how it’s taught today. (Waaaaaaaay differently than when I was fighting with Pascal and pointers back in the day, I tell you.)

Get curious. Stay tough. I did have a few hairy moments with that database upload yesterday. But I stayed with it and figured it out. I’m sure I bought myself another few healthy days of life when I’m 95 or so, just by challenging my brain at age 42.

Moral of the story: work out your brain.

Yesterday’s Every48 workout: A very calm and contemplative WALK around the local park, making sure to keep all fallen tree branches far away. I’ll be back at full strength soon. Something tells me there’s a lot of cross-training on a spinning bike coming up in my near future.